When the story opens, Arvid’s mother has just discovered that she has a recurrence of cancer, and she has decided to take the ferry from Norway back to her “home,” on Jutland. Arvid has had a testy relationship with his mother over the years and has not talked with her in a while, trying to avoid telling her that he and his wife are getting a divorce, but when he gets a message that his mother has left home, he, too, takes the ferry to Jutland. During this time, he is inundated with memories, which come at random from different times in his life—his decision to become a communist, then leave college and join the “proletariat” working in the factories (like his parents); his memories of vacationing in Jutland as a child; the loss of the brother who came just after him in birth order. Throughout, however, he returns to stories of his mother, who, when he decided to leave college and give up his chance to escape the kind of life she and her husband had been living, smacked him, hard, across the face. Ultimately, Arvid becomes a character so real that even the author has said, “I recognize myself in him…”
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It is difficult to know even where to begin in reviewing this novel, a novel so broad in its themes and scope and so sensitive to the details which make it come alive that other American readers, like me, will undoubtedly be waiting as impatiently as I am for the rest of the novels which make up the “Copenhagen Quartet.” Main character Bernardo (Nardo) Greene, an “ordinary” Chilean school teacher, was tortured for two years during the Pinochet government because he varied from the assigned curriculum in order to expand the minds of his students. Ostensibly a love story between Nardo, a widower whose wife and son were “desaparecido” during his incarceration and torture, and Michela Ibsen, a forty-year-old Danish woman whose ex-husband abused her and whose seventeen-year-old daughter committed suicide, the novel examines many themes related to love and death, freedom and forced confinement, and the worldly and the spiritual. (My favorite novel of 2010)
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To Siberia, the latest of Petterson’s novels to be translated into English, continues these themes. Nominated upon its publication in 1996 for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (which Petterson won in 2009 for I Curse the River of Time, not yet available in English), it is set in Skagen, in Denmark, at the tip of Jutland. The unnamed speaker, who is aged five when the novel opens, is a worrier—a little girl worried about the fierce-looking lions who guard the gate to a nearby house and about her father’s ears freezing and falling off when he does not wear a hat. Almost anonymous, the little girl comes closest to having a name when her devoted brother Jesper refers to her as “Sistermine.” The two are extremely close, though Jesper is three years older, and they spend much time together, sharing their dreams. Jesper plans to become a Socialist and go to Morocco, while Sistermine intends to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Dark and often bleak, To Siberia uses its title as a symbol of the yearnings of the main character, and the reader recognizes almost from the outset that she is already in Siberia, emotionally.
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Peter Hoeg’s first novel in ten years takes the reader on a trip through an almost psychedelic world of circus clowns, children with mystical abilities, powerful nuns, evil financiers, mysterious security agencies, and bizarre foundations. Kaspar Krone, a circus clown, has discovered that “SheAlmighty has tuned each person into a musical key,” and he is able to hear the music that SheAlmighty creates for each person. By tapping into the music of people’s psyches, he can understand their moods and thoughts. Often the music he hears emanating from those around him is that of Bach, the ebb and flow of a person’s inner spirit paralleling the changing moods of specific Bach masterpieces. Complex and sometimes mystifying, The Quiet Girl builds its non-linear “story” through impressionistic scenes, presented seemingly at random from the past, present, future, and even the imagination. It is up to the reader to create a narrative from the scenes presented as the characters overlap and as additional information is revealed.
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